Dan O'Bannon

O'Bannon studied filmmaking at USC, where he met a young John Carpenter; the two collaborated on a scrappy student science fiction comedy that they gradually expanded, over several years and on almost no budget, into O'Bannon's feature debut as both writer and effects artist.

A screenwriter with a genius for blue-collar science fiction, he wrote the truckers-in-space classic Alien and adapted Philip K. Dick's work for Total Recall. He got his start doing effects work on that Carpenter student film, Dark Star, an experience that directly informed the working-class, put-upon-crew tone he'd bring to his most famous screenplay years later.

He also wrote and directed the horror comedy The Return of the Living Dead, and his commercially uncredited contributions to the Total Recall screenplay — reworked substantially by later writers — were only fully clarified in later interviews and legal disputes over the story's origin and proper credit.